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T-Shaped People and Academia

bastian.rieck.me

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Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#21

Post by systemvoltage »

ironmagma wrote: post #19
mrVentures wrote: post #2

What's the point in even dividing people between such silly categories? I understand the context within a metaphor but when the author starts saying things like, 'every successful team I have been on had a t-shaped person' , it just seems absurdly reductive.

Everyone is T-shaped, so this verbiage is baffling. There’s not a single person alive who only knows about, say, dogs and nothing else.

Yeah. T-shaped is part of the corporate BS lingo. It is meaningless and it has a shallow appeal of something more profound than it ostensibly is. If you really think about it, everyone is T shaped or more like a root of a tree with depth in various aspects of their career. It is also time dependent. In 2011, I knew a lot about computation fluid dynamics. Today, not so much.

The whole thing is a fad.

Unrelated but there are a lot of things like this in the startup world as well. For example, Elon keeps saying all you need to do is find out what arrangement atoms need to be in and then figure out how to do it. Yeah, no shit. Drug discovery is just sticking the right atoms together? Or software engineering is just pressing the right keys on the keyboard and Michael Phelps is just modulating the right muscles at the right time? It sounds more profound than it really is. It is also completely unactionable and impractical.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#23

Post by zomglings »

This article points out yet ANOTHER way in which modern academia is rendering itself obsolete.

Let academia die the miserable death it deserves. Let us instead focus our efforts on building its replacements rather than participate in this research funding gangbang of society. Because, make no mistake, we are all paying for this garbage.

For replacements:

1. We need systems meant to EDUCATE goddamnit. (e.g. Khan Academy)

2. We need systems focused entirely on producing PUBLIC and cutting edge research where resources are assigned on merit. (Don't yet know what these research systems look like.)

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#24

Post by nexuist »

zomglings wrote: post #23

This article points out yet ANOTHER way in which modern academia is rendering itself obsolete. Let academia die the miserable death it deserves. Let us instead focus our efforts on building its replacements rather than participate in this research funding gangbang of society. Because, make no mistake, we are all paying for this garbage. For replacements: 1. We need systems meant to EDUCATE goddamnit. (e.g. Khan Acade…

> where resources are assigned on merit

No Child Left Behind was supposed to implement this; the problem that quickly became obvious is that schools that were already doing well got more money because their students had higher scores and schools that were struggling actually lost funding because their scores were garbage. This contributed to the gap widening instead of closing.

It's difficult to figure out how to develop a system where resources are allocated based on objective potential rather than historical metrics.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#25

Post by zomglings »

nexuist wrote: post #24
zomglings wrote: post #23

This article points out yet ANOTHER way in which modern academia is rendering itself obsolete. Let academia die the miserable death it deserves. Let us instead focus our efforts on building its replacements rather than participate in this research funding gangbang of society. Because, make no mistake, we are all paying for this garbage. For replacements: 1. We need systems meant to EDUCATE goddamnit. (e.g. Khan Acade…

> where resources are assigned on merit No Child Left Behind was supposed to implement this; the problem that quickly became obvious is that schools that were already doing well got more money because their students had higher scores and schools that were struggling actually lost funding because their scores were garbage. This contributed to the gap widening instead of closing. It's difficult to figure out how to dev…

I did not know that about No Child Left Behind. If you have some links, would really appreciate them. I will look myself, as well. Sounds like a great bit of history to learn from.

I do believe that academics have come up with the right approach to determine the value of research - anonymized peer review. The problem is, there are always signals that leak through that veil of anonymity that help you determine who the authors and even the reviewers actually are.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#26

Post by [deleted] »

zomglings wrote: post #23

This article points out yet ANOTHER way in which modern academia is rendering itself obsolete. Let academia die the miserable death it deserves. Let us instead focus our efforts on building its replacements rather than participate in this research funding gangbang of society. Because, make no mistake, we are all paying for this garbage. For replacements: 1. We need systems meant to EDUCATE goddamnit. (e.g. Khan Acade…

[deleted]

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#27

Post by BeetleB »

throwawaygh wrote: post #7

>Setting up a suitable build system. Writing some unit tests for the code. Creating a skeleton of the models that are to be developed. Designing nice mock-ups or logos. Creating animations or graphics for presentations. I actively advise students against joining labs like this and consider the whole enterprise unethical. I raise concerns whenever I'm reviewing grant proposals by folks who run their labs like this. I'…

The counter is that only a small minority of people who graduate with a PhD get to do research in their fields after graduating. It's a disservice to them if they don't gain skills beyond research.

It's why many PhDs can't get jobs in teams like mine - they don't have the skills of people with lesser degrees, and while we're not against training new candidates, we don't want to pay them large sums of money when the guy who just had a BS degree came in with all these skills.

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#28

Post by throwawayarnty »

His example of a T-shaped person doing T-shaped work is:

>Setting up a suitable build system. Writing some unit tests for the code. Creating a skeleton of the models that are to be developed. Designing nice mock-ups or logos. Creating animations or graphics for presentations.

This makes me think the author is a fairly I-shaped person, because those examples look like one area (i.e., build systems, unit tests, sketching models).

An example of a T-shaped person would be someone who can develop wet-lab experimental technique as well as new machine learning models (which in academia you have the space to do).

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#29

Post by Topolomancer »

throwawaygh wrote: post #7

>Setting up a suitable build system. Writing some unit tests for the code. Creating a skeleton of the models that are to be developed. Designing nice mock-ups or logos. Creating animations or graphics for presentations. I actively advise students against joining labs like this and consider the whole enterprise unethical. I raise concerns whenever I'm reviewing grant proposals by folks who run their labs like this. I'…

Author here—thanks for these comments! I realise that this is a valid take, but it's not what I had in mind. Being based in European academia salaries for Ph.D. students and other personnel are more or less fixed (of course, going to industry, this is not the case). I certainly do not want to exploit students.

My observation is that modern machine learning research entails so many additional moving parts (most, but not all of them, involving around SWE) that any student with skills in this area is already an asset. However, these skills are typically ignored while hiring.

I have seen the scenario you describe, but I it is definitely not what I intended to put a finger on in this post. Thanks for pointing this out!

Re: T-Shaped People and Academia

#30

Post by dilawar »

nexuist wrote: post #24
zomglings wrote: post #23

This article points out yet ANOTHER way in which modern academia is rendering itself obsolete. Let academia die the miserable death it deserves. Let us instead focus our efforts on building its replacements rather than participate in this research funding gangbang of society. Because, make no mistake, we are all paying for this garbage. For replacements: 1. We need systems meant to EDUCATE goddamnit. (e.g. Khan Acade…

> where resources are assigned on merit No Child Left Behind was supposed to implement this; the problem that quickly became obvious is that schools that were already doing well got more money because their students had higher scores and schools that were struggling actually lost funding because their scores were garbage. This contributed to the gap widening instead of closing. It's difficult to figure out how to dev…

Interesting. My opinion is to fund proportional to the ratio in change of some objective function. For example, an 2x improvement in text scores get a school x thousands. At least a significant chunk of money will motovate the bottom line to improve.
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